Search

Growing scholarship critiques ideas of migration as a development tool, however it remains a key policy instrument for sending states who seek to foster development. These critiques point to the importance of how sending states perceive their roles in the lives of migrants abroad, suggesting that this relationship is often for the benefit of the state and not for the migrant. This research goes further by looking at the ethical implications of the ways sending states have discursively constructed their relationships with migrant laborers, asking what responsibilities are owed to migrants as they act as 'agents of development.' The thesis utilizes an ethical lens to examine sending states' responsibilities towards their migrant populations, incorporating literature on ethics, citizenship, and the role of the state to argue that sending states have moral duties and responsibilities towards their migrant populations under notions of emigrant citizenship. Ideas of emigrant citizenship are interrogated in the cases of Mexico and the Philippines, and how each state utilized discourses of nationalism, patriotism, and guilt to assign value to their migrants abroad are also examined. Interviews with key officials and a review of policy documents are used to analyze how this relationship manifested itself in the ways in which those states engage with and protect migrant workers, drawing also on interview data with migrants in the United States and Hong Kong. While both the Mexican and the Philippine states are quick to engage with their migrant populations, they often do so in a way that further commodifies them as resources for home country development. In doing so, this research argues that they neglect to protect fully their migrant populations, leaving migrants to piece together their own forms of social protection in the absence of the state. This research shows how state-migrant relations that commodify migrants as agents of development have ethical consequences, undermining states' duties and responsibilities to migrant welfare. Labor migration programs can do more to fulfill these responsibilities and redraw the way the state- migrant relationship is constructed, through practices of meaningful engagement and true emigrant citizenship.

The thesis contains three chapters, each of which studies a separate dimension of inequality in modern labour markets. Each chapter analyses the individual-level behaviours of workers or firms that underpin regional and aggregate distributional features of labour markets. Together, they address cross-sectional wage inequality policy at the national level, the propagation of labour market inequalities between regions, and the impacts on employment inequalities of long term structural changes in the labour market. The first chapter considers the labour market propagation mechanisms of minimum wages, a policy commonly used to support low-wage workers. Extensive evaluations of minimum wages around the world typically find that higher minimum wages do not generate increased unemployment but are associated with substantial decreases in lower-tail wage inequality. The chapter provides the first empirical test of one explanation; a substantial search and labour supply response is behind the observed patterns. The chapter identifies the impact of minimum wages on search, distinguishing the decision of whether to search (extensive margin) from the decision of how hard to search (intensive margin) for both non-working and working individuals. The analysis combines data on UK workers' search behaviour with quasi-experimental analysis of the UK minimum wage policy structure. Results find an increase in the number of individuals searching, but a decline in search intensity, and a corresponding increase in the duration of unemployed search. There is no evidence that workers already employed in low-wage jobs are discouraged from searching for higher paying jobs. The chapter shows that these results are consistent with search explanations of minimum wage labour market consequences. The second chapter switches to addressing the spatial dimension of inequality, particularly the mechanisms that generate diverging outcomes between regions. The chapter models the individual firm employment responses to local shocks and the contributions these make to driving unequal employment rates between local regions. The chapter builds a spatial network of the universe of UK firms with near pinpoint location accuracy and estimates the response of the local network to adverse employment events. Results show that firms in close proximity to a large mass layoff in turn reduce their own employment and that these negative spillovers are highly localised. The strength of the negative spillovers approximately halves for every kilometre further away from the event. The spillovers are also very persistent, with further localised employment losses continuing for at least five years after the event. In effect, a negative spiral is triggered at the local firm level, through a combination of sluggish individual firm adjustment and local agglomeration forces, and this can be used to explain the persistence in local labour market outcomes. The chapter also develops a new method for analysing spatial variation, and outlines the large costs associate with using more traditional techniques. The third chapter, which is co-authored with Antonio Dias Da Silva and Filippos Petroulakis of the European Central Bank, is themed around the impact of long term, structural changes on employment inequality. Technological progress and deepening global integration have contributed to reduced middle-skill employment in a process commonly referred to as employment polarisation. Simultaneously, there has been a large decline in the number of hours worked per worker in European economies. The chapter investigates the relationship between hours per worker and employment polarisation, asking whether hours per worker follow similar polarisation patterns. The analysis categorises occupations based on their task content, in particular the type and degree of routinisation involved. Results find large relative declines in hours per worker in routine manual jobs – precisely the occupations most negatively affected by employment polarisation from routine-biased technical change. A lower relative decline in hours per worker is observed in higher skilled jobs growing through polarisation. The patterns affect all age, gender and education groups approximately equally. The chapter concludes by evaluating the contribution of the hours per worker margin to overall employment polarisation.

This dissertation explores the lives of Haitian women in Santiago, the capital of Chile, with a focus on their everyday encounters with Chilean state agents and private employers. It analyses the experiences of Haitian women as they navigate bureaucratic institutions and practices, negotiate their working conditions with employers and public defendants, train as care and domestic workers, seek modes of subsistence as street vendors, and understand themselves as migrant workers and working mothers. I argue that Haitian women’s efforts to transform their lives in a new country reveal the nature of state institutions in Chile, in the context of the legacies of its military dictatorship and the experience of an immigration boom not seen in its recent history. My account is based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Haitian women and their families living in Santiago, state agents involved in migration management and control, and employers of Haitian women. The dissertation uses migration as a case study to contribute to anthropological understandings of states and bureaucracies, work and markets, sameness and difference, and their effects on people’s lives. I begin with an overview of the project’s main themes of migration, states, bureaucracy, legality, and formality, and I reflect on encounters as a critical site through which anthropology can make sense of difference and social change. Chapter two draws on historical and statistical data to show how the relationships between Haitian women and the Chilean state are underpinned by the country’s history of migration, the configuration of racial hierarchies, and the neoliberal foundations of market democracy. Chapter three uses processes of visa application to analyse how Haitian women devise different strategies to ensure residence and labour formality through bureaucratic practices of speculative legality. Chapter four then draws on job-seeking encounters to analyse the consequences of these processes, revealing how gendered and racialised differences produce a landscape of servitude, in which migrants’ value as workers is continuously negotiated. The two successive chapters focus on Haitian women’s encounters with social protection programmes that seek to integrate migrants in the country’s national project. Chapter five explores the relation between human rights discourses and work in the formal economy for the Chilean state. Chapter six describes Haitian women’s experiences of pregnancy in Chile and the contradictory effects the status assigned to motherhood has in Haitian women’s lives. The final chapter follows the experience of Haitian women who have failed to secure formal employment and who make a living as informal and wageless traders in neighbourhood markets. Altogether, encounters between Haitian women and Chileans transform the state’s definitions of migrant legality and labour formality through economic practices of black markets, humanitarian rationales, gendered and racialised moral discourses, intimate body transformations and the normalisation of urban poverty. As a result, this ethnography enables the understanding of state formation and belonging as multi-scalar relations and affective processes that contribute to the anthropological knowledge of states, migration, and intersectional encounters.

This PhD thesis focuses on determinants of labour market outcomes in development economics with a special interest in South Africa and China. After an introduction in chapter 1, the key chapter 2, Ethnic Diversity and Labour Market Outcomes: Evidence from Post-Apartheid South Africa joint with Sara Tonini, investigates how ethnic diversity amongst black South Africans affects their employment opportunities in the post-Apartheid era. We find that ethnic diversity has a positive impact on the employment rate of the black South Africans, and it only affects ethnic groups with relatively large population size. To address the endogeneity of ethnic composition, we explore the location of historical “black homelands” and argue that districts more equally distant to multiple homelands are more ethnically diverse. In our instrumental variable regressions, a one standard deviation increase in ethnic diversity index increases employment rate by 3 (5) percentage point in 1996 (2001), which is around 8% (13%) of the average employment rate. We then propose a model of a coordination game to explain these findings. A more ethnically diverse place requires a higher rate of inter-ethnic communication to maintain social connection. As inter-ethnic communication requires more skills than intra-ethnic connection, people in ethnically diverse districts are motivated to invest more in social skills to be able to communicate with those outside their own group. The acquisition of these social skills makes them better equipped for the labour market. The remaining two chapters look into the intergenerational transmission of socio-economic status in South Africa and China. Chapter 3, Returns to Education, Marital Sorting and Family Background in South Africa joint with Patrizio Piraino, applies the model of Lam (1993, JPE) which combines intergenerational transmission of ability and assortative mating to investigate the relative explanatory power of father-in-law’s and father’s background for male wages. In the empirical analysis, after correcting for potential measurement errors in earnings and education, we find that father-in-law’s schooling is more correlated with male workers’ labour market earnings, employment rate and labour force participation than own father’s schooling in contemporary South Africa. This difference is more obvious when parental educational levels are higher. Chapter 4, Higher Education Expansion and Intergenerational Mobility in Contemporary China, studies how higher education affects the upward mobility of people from relatively disadvantaged families. Intergenerational occupational mobility is stimulated when children from different social classes end up in similar occupations. Whether or not they have similar occupational status depends not only on their level of education but also the occupational returns to education. Given there is already a convergence in educational achievements between children from different social classes in contemporary China, in this paper, I focus on their occupational returns to education. Occupational status is measured by the widely-accepted ISEI scaling system ranging from 16 to 90 points with large number indicating higher occupational status. I take advantage of an exogenous college expansion policy in 1999 as a natural experiment and find that one additional year of education increases the occupational status of their first job by 2.243 (2.774) points on average along the ISEI scale in OLS (IV) regressions. And children from upper-class families do not necessarily have higher returns to education than children from other social classes. The average occupational returns to education are higher for the most recent job than the first job, but the difference among social classes is still not significant.

My research seeks to understand the behaviour of workers and firms and how their decisions affect labour market outcomes. My PhD dissertation consists of three separate Chapters that use detailed historical, census and administrative data to gain insights into the mechanisms at play when incentives for production and location decisions change. Chapter 1 asks whether financial incentives can induce inventors to innovate more. I exploit a large reduction in the patent fee in the United Kingdom in 1884 to distinguish between its effect on increased efforts to invent, and a decrease in patent quality due to a lower quality threshold. For this analysis I create a detailed new dataset of 54,000 British inventors with renewal information for each patent. In the longer run high-quality patenting increases by over 100 percent, and the share of new patents due to greater effort accounts for three quarters of the pre-reform share of high-quality patents. To test for the presence of credit constraints I generate two wealth proxies from inventor names and addresses, and find a larger innovation response for inventors with lower wealth. These results indicate efficiency gains from decreasing the cost of inventing and in addition, from relaxing credit constraints. In Chapter 2 we assess the effects of changes in ethnic neighbourhood composition in England and Wales. A change in social housing allocations in the 1990s serves as instrument for changes in the local ethnic composition. For the analysis we create a dataset of highly disaggregated census geographies for 1991-2011. The results imply that an exogenous increase in social housing minority share by 10 percentage points raises the minority share in private housing by 1.2 percentage points initially. This sorting effect is larger for privately rented than for privately owned housing. We further show that an increase in the minority share leads to higher local population growth and a small decrease in house prices in the longer run. Chapter 3 proposes a new approach for analysing responses to comprehensive labour market reforms. Using detailed micro data we evaluate the German Hartz reforms that aimed at reducing unemployment. The timing of the reforms affects the model parameters, which are estimated using matched data on 430,000 workers in 340,000 firms. Contrary to previous findings, our analysis shows that the reforms marginally reduced unemployment at the cost of a pronounced decline in wages. Low-skilled workers suffered the largest wage losses. Furthermore, we decompose the contribution of each reform wave on employment and wages, and document a structural shift in the factors that govern overall wage dispersion.